Peeling Red Paint

This story has been half finished all week, I had to complete it regardless of how bad it ended up being. I think the very end works, and the first page isn't bad, but other than that... Well, read at your own risk I suppose.

The door haunted his dreams.
Even years later it appeared, its effects were, as he described them to the parade of therapists, psychologists, and counselors that he went through after the loss of his parents, paradoxical. When it appeared, which was, he always assured them, not very often, it immediately became the focus of the dream.
“It appears at odd corners or in the middle of a road, never flush with a wall or anywhere you might expect a door to appear.” This frustrated his sense of right and wrong in a way that he could never make plain to his satisfaction; the psychologist would mutter to herself and make notes to the effect of,
“Patient exhibits OCD like tendencies; candidate for SSRI’s?” before asking him to continue.
“The entire dream then starts to orient itself around the door, to warp, if you will, like the door is some super-massive force. Even the people in the dream are drawn into its orbit, they pretend not to notice it but they’re avoidance is conscious. Would be conscious, it feels intentional to me, in the dream that is.
“I feel a profound dread when it appears, even when I can’t see it, but I too am drawn by its influence. As I get closer to the door it feels like I’m having one of those falling dreams, but like I’m falling through syrup. The final impact is inevitable, but it’s drawn out for what seems like forever. It’s agonizing. I fight it as long as I can, instinctively, but if I don’t wake up, and I frequently don’t, I find myself with my hand on the doorknob.
“It’s at this point that the terror is most intense, but there is also some growing excitement, the anticipation of discovery I suppose.” At this point he would trail off, finding it difficult to talk about anything with the psychic weight of that oak door with its peeling red paint and tarnished brass knob.
“Do you think that your parents are on the other side of the door?” The psychologists could rarely resist that pregnant pause. “Is that why it troubles you?”
“No, it troubles me because the door is real.”
Then would follow the typical run around. The psychologist, firm in her belief that the door is the key to his worry and depression would hound the man for deeper meanings, and he would counter by insisting that it was just a door in a boarding house in which his family stayed when he was much younger. That it stuck with him because, even in real life everyone else had seemed to studiously ignore it, because it was the one door in the boarding house that was always locked, and last but not least because his final conversation with his parents had been pleading with them to leave. His pleas motivated by an irrational terror of whatever it was he believed occupied the narrow space behind the door. His father had shouted at him “Fine, I’ll have them open it for you, if it means you’ll stop ruining our vacation!” and stormed out, followed moments later by his mother.
They both vanished, apparently into thin air, that evening. He was the last person ever to speak to them. It was at this point that he would fire the psychologist, and on nights like these he would walk to the downtown office in which he worked and pour over expense reports and balance sheets until it felt like his eyes were bleeding, and in the morning he would have a truly inspired investment ready for approval by the board. He would stagger home then, for an early lunch, get drunk off of hundred dollar champagne and collapse, alone, in a king sized bed with silken sheets.
And then the economy tanked, and for a while there was no buying, and what champagne remained was of a thoroughly inferior vintage. While he waited for bailout money, with nothing to occupy his mind or energy, Mark Pennington decided to take his first vacation in seven years.
He knew the way by heart still; east on I-17, exit fifty five northbound, almost to the Canadian border and then onto a veritable maze of dirt and gravel roads through dense pine forest, until the lake opens up in front of you glinting in the setting sun.
His parents, creatures of habit, had brought him to the boarding house for the first time when he was seven, and then returned on vacation, or holidays when they wanted to avoid the extended family, between two and three times a year until they disappeared a few days before his thirteenth birthday.
He didn’t know how they had found the place, six hours out of the city and half an hour from the nearest town. It certainly didn’t advertise much and wasn’t large enough to host more than two or three families at a time. All he knew was that they always paid a special “family rate” but he was never clear how exactly they were related to the owners.
He had not called ahead, but this late in the season the air grew cold at night and he remembered there always being at least one free room. Pulling into the makeshift parking lot, down the long and winding drive, he saw that there was only one car parked in addition to the van bearing the insignia of Evening Falls Lodge. He parked next to the white, four door, sedan and walked past the garage that still leaned at the precise and worrisome angle that it always had, and towards the main building.
The lodge had begun its life as a more or less rustic lake-side cabin, but over the years it had begun to sprawl, adding a three season porch here, an extension there, a lean-to that became another enclosed room there, until it took up most of two city lots. Evidently whoever had started the expansion of the lodge no longer owned the place because it was exactly as he remembered it.
The door was open, only a screen stood between the entrance way and encroaching night. It opened with a creek to a light touch and Mark stepped, hesitantly, inside. “Hello? Mrs. McDormet, hello?”
“One moment dear,” came the response, echoing from the lodges cavernous kitchens. It was followed closely by a matronly round woman of indeterminate, older, middle age, a bland smile fixed across her otherwise remarkable face. Her eyes lit, after a moment, with recognition, “Mark! Oh, dear me, but it has been a while. How are you doing you must tell me all about your past… fourteen years? It’s just you then? No wife, no kids?”
“Just me this time, Mrs. McDormet.”
“Please, call me Nancy. Follow me, I’ve got biscuits in the oven, we’ll just get you settled and you can come down and grab one fresh.”
He followed the bustling woman through an archway to his right and into the dining room, a long room with a sloping roof, full of cheap nick-knacks and tasteless singing-fish wall mounts, with a semi-circular bar at the far end. “How many nights will you be staying with us?”
“Just the weekend, for now. If all goes smoothly I’ll need to be back at work Monday, but these days that’s a rare enough thing.”
The woman wiped her hands on her floral print apron and rapidly entered the transaction into an ancient, analog, cash register. “Alright, at the family rate that’ll set you back $75. That’s with breakfast and lunch included, dinners are extra. Susan!” The last exclamation was delivered over her shoulder and the sound of rapid footfalls was the only response.
“Yes ma’am?” Susan proved to be a much younger woman, eighteen to twenty years old, her dark hair fell in waves to her shoulders and her eyes, equally dark, shone with a frustrated intelligence.
“Please show this guest to the violet room, and get him his key.”
“Of course, follow me mister…” she turned and strode out of the room, pausing only to take a skeleton key labeled “V” from the pegboard by the arch to the entrance way.
“Mark.” He said, following her.
The rooms were color coordinated, and named accordingly, the decorations were all of the sort that one heard stories about but never considered in real life, all plastic flowers in cheap china vases and overpriced novelty wall hangings. He felt as though he had stepped onto the set for a '50s sitcom, in too-bright RCA Real-Color.
He knew he had been coddled by interior decorators and high end designers far too long when he realized that he actually enjoyed décor that tried to hard. He resolved not to tell any of his coworkers that one could, in fact, have too much understated elegance.
If he still had coworkers, if he still had a job.
“Well, here you are, anything else I can do for you?” Susan's voice broke his reverie.
“This is the room that I stayed in last time. Does she never redecorate?”
“I wouldn't know, I've only worked here this Summer. You come here often then?”
“Not for fourteen years.” one corner of his mouth twitched upwards, “You sound surprised.”
“We just don't get many... people like you here.” Susan met his eyes for the first time.
“Rich people?”
“No, young ones. Mostly it's grandparents and occasionally a family of four still reeking of their white picket fence and two thirds share in a dog...” She smiled faintly, “That's when there's anyone at all of course. Usually I just dust and want to die.”
He tried to suppress a smile of his own, not because of her wit which felt dull from lack of use, but because of the infectious force of her personality. “Whatever you do then, don't go into investment banking then.”
“Is that what you do then?”
“That's...what they tell me. So far as I can tell I've been paying fake money to business ideas and then reselling the idea of that investment to people who need to pad out investment portfolios so that it doesn't become to obvious how heavily they're stacked towards real-estate.” He shook his head, “I don't think I've bought or sold anything that actually exists in over a year. Such is the miracle of economics.”
“Ah, so you're one of the bastards then.” She stuck her tongue out, “Take me into town for dinner and I won't tell Al.”
“He's not fond of, how did you put it, my kind, is Al?”
“Give him half a chance and he'll give you an earful. Actually, I recommend just not sitting still long enough for him to corner you, that's been working for me.” She shrugged.
“I can't really blame him. If the money weren't so good I would have gotten out of it long ago. I've been to too many good therapists for me to get away with a lot of the double-think that my 'colleagues' indulge in.” He had lost his grin while talking and when he flashed it again it was weak and didn't reach his cheeks, let alone his eyes. “Of course the money is very good. Where did you want to eat?”
“There are about three restaurants of note within driving distance, but one of them is this exceptional German place. I usually go there when my bank account and distaste for Nancy's home cooking have both swelled sufficiently.”
“Alright then, as the lady wishes. When do you want to leave?”
“I've got a few things to do, can you wait an hour? Oh, and, I'll drive. These days driving a beemer is like asking to get your tail lights smashed out.” She tossed this over her shoulder as she walked out, assuming she knew the answer to her question.
“Yeah,” he said to the empty room, “that should be just fine.”
He hadn't packed much, a few changes of clothes that he hung carefully in the closet, only now realizing how inappropriately the silk shirts and pressed slacks felt in this setting. Maybe it was the contrast between the carefully selected shades of gray against the willfully clashing room? Or was it that he had doubled the value of the room by stepping into it? Regardless why, oh why in the name of whatever he still held holy, had he packed a smoking jacket?
He sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands before summoning what remained of his energy to turn off his useless phone and toss it in the, now mostly empty, suitcase. It ricocheted off the gifts he had brought for the McDormets and was now thinking better of, people as blue-collared and bucolic as they evidently were would probably not appreciate the 2006 Les Bassards he'd pulled from his wine cellar, and they may even be insulted by the thick, unlabeled cigars. He couldn't remember.
When the seemingly ordinary clock on the wall split in two and began an intricately cartoonish tolling of the hour, some fifteen minutes later, he was roused from his self induced torpor and made his way, somewhat unsteadily, down to the first floor.
Finding no one in the entry way he turned into the dining room and was three steps in before he noticed Al McDormet in an armchair at the far end of the room. He wore a long sleeved shirt, cuffed twice, and a cap pulled low over his wind reddened face. He held a pipe clenched between his teeth and a newspaper of ill repute and large font size in his leathery hands. He was, Mark reflected, an artifact of a bygone era, before he doubled back, taking Susan's words of warning to heart, and made his way to the library in the opposite wing of the house.
As he made his way through the several halls and sitting rooms separating him from his goal Mark passed an open door into the kitchen from which spilled yellow light, the smell of bubbling fat, and the closing strains of one of Elvis's more obscure songs. “Are you going to want dinner dear? Only, I'm just about to fry up the fish so I need to know...” Nancy's voice overwhelmed the vocal stylings of the King.
“Ah, no thanks Nancy, I'm going out this evening. See what's changed with the old town, you know?”
“Oh, alright then. Susan said she was going to be out tonight too, so I guess it will just be me and Al then. Quiet night, all alone.” Mark had already passed on.
The library was the mast sedate room in house, dark wood paneling supplanted garish wallpaper and strange artifacts and ephemera took the place of chintzy flee market artifacts and overpriced dolls. It was a relatively large room, though low ceilinged, with a fireplace at the far end and three clusters of overstuffed armchairs around side tables. There were two large bookshelves along the wall opposite the armchairs, to the right of the rooms entrance, and these were separated by a narrow section of deep shadow. The only light in the room came from lamps on the side tables and the setting suns last rays entering through several skylights.
In between the bookshelves was the door. Slightly more narrow than a standard door it looked oddly out of proportion, at one time it had been painted red but what paint remained was faded and peeling and the brass knob was almost black with age and disuse. It was the only part of the house not perfectly kept up.
He was still staring at it when Susan found him a half hour later.
“Can't settle on something to read?”
Mark responded with a non-committal grunt of acknowledgement.
“They're mostly rubbish, I've read them all. Some of them twice... Lets get out of here.”
He didn't talk much in the car and Susan drove too fast to compensate, but by the time they had reached the Bavarian Hunter Gasthaus she had managed to draw him out a bit. By the time the waiter had come by to offer them an after dinner pinch of snuff he was talking animatedly about the backstabbings and petty rivalries that defined his life in the world of high finance and Susan was laughing.
The road back to the Lodge was blessedly empty, and they staggered through the front door, cheeks red with laughter and heady German beer (brewed on site for over a hundred years! According to the menu). Susan held her finger to her lips as they tiptoed with exaggerated care to the second floor. Their bedrooms were at opposite ends of the house but somehow they both turned right at the head of the stairs.
It would pain a connoisseur to see fine wine drunk straight from the bottle, but neither Mark nor Susan had any such reservations and by the end of the bottle they had lost many of the few reservations they did have. Playful shoving and tickling segued into a drunken sort of tango to the harmony of their hormones.
She was young and lithe, he was rich and soft. It was a frantic sort of coupling, fraught with need unencumbered with emotional attachment, an attraction between two minds, far from the places and circumstances that provided them with sufficient stimulation. It wasn't creative or beautiful but raw, animalistic, potent. She bit her lip to keep from moaning, the walls were deceptively thin.
They drifted down, through a haze of pheromones, expensive wine, and light caresses before the penultimate darkness of sleep overtook them.
And he was being led. What or whom was leading him wasn't clear but the tugging was unmistakable. He wound his way down passages cut from stone and lit by torches mounted in wall sconces and doing little more than deepening the surrounding shadow. The flagstones beneath his feet seemed to slip and twist past each other beneath his feet which carried him ever deeper. There were rooms to either side, every so often, and faces would appear in windows, pale and screaming, but it was silent in the corridor and for all the interest Mark took in the rooms they could have been soulless white mile markers.
He tripped over a fault between two particularly combative flagstones and went sprawling, scrapping his out-flung hands. When he raised his head from the cool floor the Door loomed over him, standing in the middle of the corridor. He closed his eyes and felt a soft shag carpet beneath his cheek.
He stood up in the library, all color drained from it in the bright moonlight. His palms were sweaty and he wished he had more than a pair of boxers to wipe them on, his mouth was terrible dry, adrenaline coursed softly through his veins. Resolutely he turned to his left, towards the arm chairs and back towards the exit...
...but he kept turning and the paint, though peeling, was still red. And the Door was ajar.
He watched in detached horror as his right hand stretched out and, with two fingers, he pushed the Door the rest of the way open. Bright light poured from the door way and he stepped over the lintel.
The screen door swung closed behind him with a sharp snap and he pulled his cap low, shadowing his wind raw face as he entered the lodge, an artifact of a different age.